


Out of the Predator's Jaws

by efnisien



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/efnisien/pseuds/efnisien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel walks away.  Lilah doesn't understand.  AU for "Home."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the Predator's Jaws

Angel would never tell her this, but Lilah smelled delicious. It was the scarf, he thought. Something about the scarf, an adornment she had never worn in life. The vividness of its color was nothing to the elusive smell of blood. In another life he would have been tempted to yank off the scarf to find the blood beneath, the pale, smiling scar. He had done her enough violence, though.

Even now she smelled of passion and sly plans and Wesley's desperate lust. Passion, and something else that Angel might have called affection and Wesley would have called manipulation.

"You're brooding again," Lilah said to him, breaking from her practiced sales pitch. "That has got to be embarrassing."

"You get used to it," he said, although his heart, cold, dead thing that it was, wasn't in the repartee. "You get used to a lot of things."

Her smile glinted. Always a predator, Lilah, even in small gestures. She flipped a switch, and Connor's drawn face appeared on the screen that occupied the far wall.

Angel had known what bombs looked like. Swords and stakes might be the weapons that he favored, but modern weapons were not beyond him. Now he knew what bombs looked like strapped to his son.

"Icing on the cake, boss," Lilah said. "We can help you stop this. Your son, Angel."

Angel wondered, perhaps because his mind was sliding away from the implications of what he was seeing, if Lilah had ever called Wesley "boss." Maybe the other way araound.

Curiously, Lilah's emphasis on Connor made Angel look more closely at all the people trapped in the background, all the people Lilah didn't seem concerned with. She knew him too well. She had seen the things he had done to Wesley on account of Connor.

And this was the crux, that although Connor was the brightest light in a long and terrible life, he was not the only one. That in the wide world there were people like Wesley, people like Gunn and Fred, other people (this time his mind slid away from Cordelia's name), other lights, other lives. The people Connor was threatening to blow up with him were themselves lights in other lives.

He could accept Lilah's offer and save them. It would be so easy.

"I'm sorry, Lilah," Angel said quietly.

"Time moves, you know," she said. "Whatever happens, you won't be able to undo."

"No," he said. "He wasn't meant to live. Maybe, if he never found a way to live"--certainly he counted himself complicit in that failure--"it's time to let him die, so he can do no further harm."

Lilah said something to his back as he departed. The words didn't matter. If she didn't understand what he had said, nothing he added would change the situation.

Connor had made his choice. Let him live with it, if he could; let him die of it, if he must.


End file.
